Tag Archives: SEO Writing

6 Common Website Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

An effective business website helps you accomplish several sales and marketing goals at once. It provides you with SEO traction, drawing traffic and boosting brand awareness. It educates your buyers, providing them with confidence in your products and services, increasing the likelihood of conversion. It captures information that your sales team can use down the road, including names and email addresses from potential customers. It conveys your company’s professionalism and expertise. It extends meaningful calls to action.

That’s a pretty robust job description, and it should come as no surprise that some websites don’t quite measure up. The good news is that many of the most common website deficiencies are totally fixable; and often, all it really takes is a content upgrade.

Website Mistakes That Content Can Fix

1) Poor calls to action.

Let’s start with a pretty simple example. Every page of your website should have at least one clear call to action, inviting the reader to take the next step. This might mean signing up for your email newsletter, calling to set an appointment, or purchasing a product from your ecommerce store. If your site isn’t getting the results you’d like, it may be a case of low call to action quality or quantity.

2) Insufficient thought leadership.

One of the most important roles your website serves is earning the trust of your readers, something you achieve by demonstrating your expertise. If your website lacks meaningful thought leadership, it may be because you either don’t have a blog or you don’t update it as often as you should. Both are issues that a content marketing team can help you resolve.

3) No meta data.

Meta titles and meta descriptions play an important role in signifying to the search engine algorithms, and to search engine users, what your site is all about. Well-written meta data is crucial for SEO and can even help facilitate conversions. Neglecting meta data means forfeiting a valuable opportunity to improve your site’s effectiveness.

4) Poor SEO.

Meta titles and descriptions are just one example of how poor copywriting can lead to impoverished SEO. Consider also that well-written and substantive content, with naturally integrated keywords, can be essential for search engine success. It’s also critical to write and format your content in a way that recognizes the growing popularity of voice search. Again, a content marketing team can help raise the SEO value of your website’s copywriting.

5) Low quality writing.

More generally, having bad writing on your site can compromise your SEO potential while also diminishing your brand’s sense of professionalism. A good content team can help you replace lackluster content with writing that’s tight, clean, precise, engaging, and error-free.

6) Duplicate content.

This is an especially big problem for companies that have a lot of individual product or service pages. Repeating the same boilerplate copy on multiple pages hurts your SEO potential, and also makes the entire site less engaging to the reader. A good content writing team can help you think of fresh and unique ways to convey the necessary information, even when it’s a little repetitive by its very nature.

Make Your Website a Traffic-Generating, Sales-Converting Machine

A good website can fuel business growth in more ways than one. To ensure your website is performing at a peak level, consider consulting with a content writing team.

We’d love to help. To connect with Grammar Chic, call us at 803-831-7444 or visit www.grammarchic.net.

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Filed under Content Marketing, Web Content

A Quick Guide to Enterprise SEO

Every company wants to be found by search engine users; for this reason, every company should have an interest in search engine optimization. It’s been said before, but warrants repeating: Any company that can’t be found by the Google algorithms might as well be invisible.

But of course, specific SEO needs vary greatly from one business to the next. A small, local brick-and-mortar store has a radically different SEO agenda than, say, an international conglomerate.

This brings us to enterprise SEO, a subset of search engine optimization that caters specifically to the needs of very large businesses. But what does enterprise SEO really entail—and what makes it different from other SEO endeavors?

Enterprise SEO Defined

Essentially, when we talk about enterprise SEO, we’re talking about search engine optimization activities for Fortune 1000 companies—big brands whose needs are more robust (and whose budgets are typically bigger) than, say, mom and pop shops.

Enterprise SEO needs are varied. On the one hand, there is a need to be discoverable by everyday consumers—especially in localized contexts. At the same time, enterprise SEO must preserve online reputation while advancing global branding. A good enterprise SEO campaign will balance these different concerns, and will take an interest in both granular and big-picture issues.

Hiring an Enterprise SEO Company

Enterprise SEO companies—which typically work closely with existing marketing departments and CMOs—must bring some unique skillsets to bear. A few of these include:

  • Search engine trends can turn on a dime, and it’s important for big enterprises to be able to pivot accordingly.
  • It’s simply impossible to do efficient enterprise-level work without automation. A good enterprise SEO company will be certified and experienced in key technologies.
  • The volume of content that’s needed for effective enterprise SEO is typically quite large; it requires someone who’s able to keep up with this work.
  • CMOs want to see that their efforts are paying off—and the only way to prove this to them is to furnish them with advanced data and analytics.

Embracing Enterprise SEO

For companies that are large in size, the work of SEO can be daunting—but with the right partner, it’s possible to achieve great results. Engaging an enterprise SEO firm—complemented with a strong content campaign—can be the critical first step in that direction. Consider whether enterprise SEO is right for your company’s needs.

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Filed under Business Writing, Client Spotlight

SEO and Content Marketing: The Perfect Match?

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Some online marketing pundits lend the impressions that content marketing has effectively replaced search engine optimization (SEO)—that you can do one but not both, and that content marketing has basically killed SEO, or at least exhausted its usefulness.

A Complex Relationship

There is a grain of truth in this, of course. Changes to search engine algorithms have made content quality the key metric for search engine success, whereas many of the older, exploitative SEO strategies have been heavily penalized. If you want to boost your search rankings, then, writing compelling content works way better than keyword-stuffing or other questionable SEO tricks.

But even this statement points to the complex relationship that content marketing and SEO have: They are not as easy to separate or to consider on their own merits as some would have us believe. Ultimately, content marketing and SEO can be used together, working toward the same end. So long as your focus is on content quality—on delivering value to the user—there is no reason why you cannot also incorporate some thoughtful, well-balanced elements of SEO strategy, including some judicious SEO keywords.

How Keywords Help with Content Marketing

Not only do keywords have SEO value, but, when used properly, they can actually make your content even better—of even higher quality, that is. Consider:

  • A keyword will help to focus each blog post or article on a single idea; it will provide you with your topic and your central thrust, and ensure that you’re not veering too far into tangents. Keywords help you stay organized.
  • A keyword can also make the blog or article more helpful and readable for the user, providing a clear sense of what it’s about.
  • Using keywords means researching keywords, which will help you develop a better understanding of your topic and your audience’s needs.
  • Keyword research can also be invaluable for prompting new thoughts and fresh ideas.

In addition to all of the above, of course, SEO keywords can increase the chances that your content actually gets found and read. That’ not to say that all keyword use is helpful, and there is certainly such a thing as being inelegant and clumsy with the way you shoehorn keywords into a piece. When done properly, though, keywords can enhance the quality of your content.

To learn more about content marketing, please don’t hesitate to contact the Grammar Chic, Inc. team today. Learn more by visiting www.grammarchic.net, or call 803-831-7444.

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Filed under Content Marketing